Bakunin Quotes

“Crowned heads, wealth and privilege may well tremble should ever again the Black and Red unite!"
-after the split between Anarchists and Marxists in 1872”
― Otto von Bismarck

“„If there is a State, there must be domination of one class by another and, as a result, slavery; the State without slavery is unthinkable – and this is why we are the enemies of the State.”
Bakunin”
― Bakunin

“Bakunin, on the other hand, considered himself a revolutionist of the deed, "not a philosopher and not an inventor of systems, like Marx." He adamantly refused to recognize the existence of any "a priori ideas or preordained, preconceived laws." Bakunin rejected the view that social change depended on the gradual maturation of "objective" historical conditions. On the contrary, he believed that men shaped their own destinies, that their lives could not be squeezed into a Procrustean bed of abstract sociological formulas. "No theory, no ready-made system, no book that has ever been written will save the world," Bakunin declared. "I cleave to no system, I am a true seeker." Mankind was not compelled to wait patiently as the fabric of history unfolded in the fullness of time. By teaching the working masses theories, Marx would only succeed in stifling the revolutionary ardor every man already possessed—"the impulse to liberty, the passion for equality, the holy instinct of revolt.”
― Paul Avrich, The Russian Anarchists

“Every command slaps liberty in the face.”
― Mikhail Bakhtin

“While entrusting the intellectuals with a critical role in the forthcoming revolution, Bakunin at the same time cautioned them against attempting to seize political power on their own, in the manner of the Jacobins or their eager disciple Auguste Blanqui. On this point Bakunin was most emphatic. The very idea that a tiny band of conspirators could execute a coup d'état for the benefit of the people was, in his derisive words, a "heresy against common sense and historical experience." These strictures were aimed as much at Marx as at Blanqui. For both Marx and Bakunin, the ultimate goal of the revolution was a stateless society of men liberated from the bonds of oppression, a new world in which the free development of each was the condition for the free development of all. But where Marx envisioned an intervening proletarian dictatorship that would eliminate the last vestiges of the bourgeois order, Bakunin was bent on abolishing the state outright. The cardinal error committed by all revolutions of the past, in Bakunin's judgment, was that one government was turned out only to be replaced by another. The true revolution, then, would not capture political power; it would be a social revolution, ridding the world of the state itself.”
― Paul Avrich, The Russian Anarchists

“Bakunin perceived the authoritarianism inherent in a so-called dictatorship of the proletariat. The state, he insisted, however popular in form, would always serve as a weapon of exploitation and enslavement. He predicted the inevitable formation of a new "privileged minority" of savants and experts, whose superior knowledge would enable them to use the state as an instrument to rule over the uneducated manual laborers in the fields and factories. The citizens of the new people's state would be rudely awakened from their self-delusion to discover that they had become "the slaves, the playthings, and the victims of a new group of ambitious men." The only way the common people could escape this lamentable fate was to make the revolution themselves, total and universal, ruthless and chaotic, elemental and unrestrained. "It is necessary to abolish completely, in principle and in practice, everything that might be called political power," Bakunin concluded, "for so long as political power exists, there will always be rulers and ruled, masters and slaves, exploiter and exploited".”
― Paul Avrich, The Russian Anarchists

“Bakunin’s brilliant predictions of the consequences of Marx’s statism have not become the foundation for a developing anti-statist praxis, but rather a hollow chorus of “we told you so.”
― Christopher Day, The Historical Failure of Anarchism: Implications for the Future of the Revolutionary Project